Updated info at bottom

4 Mass effect related journals in a row!

Shepard is taking a while to get anywhere though the worst is over now. I end up leaving her for a few days (or week) before coming back to edit some more. Currently after a revisit to the textures (brighter, desaturated the blue grey, painted suit lights!) and simplifying the helmet, the model is now more or less ready to be unfolded in Pepakura Designer.

Builders of the model will have a choice to use the default head, or the closed face helmet. The head will sit inside a collar and have the hair put on like a wig (I really hope that works alright). The helmet however is merged to a different collar piece to form a single object to be glued in place.

Unfold progress:

-Legs: Complete
-Body: Complete
-Head: Third edited version complete
-Helmet: Third version needs unfolding
-Extras: Complete
-Avenger: Complete

Aggh it's ready to be printed shortly! Will have to test the texture brightness but all should to ok. Need to psyche myself up for a busy 2-3 weeks of building.

Edit: Well I would start if both inkjet printers in our house weren't so screwed up...

Estimate for completion: early to mid June.


Fun fact: in ME3 several assault rifles from the previous game are now missing their scopes (i.e. you now add functional scopes with weapon mods). Look at the back of the unmodded Vindicator and there's a black circle where the old scope was. To get around this for the Avenger I used "Assault Rifle Scope IV" as it looked most like the ME2 one, then shaped it to fit and painted a custom glass texture (couldn't find the game's one).


The shape of the leg armour means the join here between PDOs is curved instead of the usual flat cut-off. But with the right build order it shouldn't matter.


The helmet can only be simplified so much because the textures are all as separate strips in the image file. Still, it'll almost certainly be easier than building the face. Think it's missing some red? Nope, in ME3 the helmet no longer has the top red stripe by default.

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16/5/12

Uh oh. I managed to wrangle one of our printers to print acceptable colours for the model so was ready to start building. I love making the faces so I jumped in with the head. Turns out it needed more editing at the back (needless detail) but no worries that's an easy fix and the reload 3D model function worked in Pepakura. I then wanted to test out the hair. It sucks. Looks terrible in fact. Gah, I ought to have learned the lesson from some old Fire Emblem models. 'Wig' based hair construction is extremely unreliable. Paper tension means it doesn't retain the proper shape, not does it fit anywhere as neatly as the 3D model suggests. Shaped hair such as in the Midna model wins everytime. So yeah...will anyone be bothered if I scrap the head and just use the helmet? :/

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Yes that's right!

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